Impact of Spiritual Care Workers in Hospitals: Strategies for Improvement

The chief aim of the research paper is to analyse the impact of volunteers especially spiritual care workers in the hospital and how can the state of these volunteers in the hospital can be improved. This report will also include strategies to spread the awareness about the difference between religion and spirituality in the hospitals.

Running head: SOCIOLOGY
Sociology
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1SOCIOLOGY
The chief aim of the research paper is to analyse the impact of volunteers especially
spiritual care workers in the hospital and how can the state of these volunteers in the hospital can
be improved. This report will also include strategies to spread the awareness about the difference
between religion and spirituality in the hospitals.
With the technological advance in the healthcare industry in the past decade, global
healthcare organizations are focusing on spiritual wellbeing of the healthcare service users along
with their physical and mental wellbeing (Stevens & Raferty, 2018; Gonçalves, Lucchetti,
Menezes & Vallada, 2015). Physicians have attempted for balancing their care with the help of
reclaiming more spiritual roots as well as recognizing the same (Snowden et al., 2018). Patients
who are being admitted to health care homes for a prolonged period of time often develops
psychological issues like depression, anxiety as well as social isolation (Zollfrank et al., 2015).
The primary role of the spiritual care team is to provide the people with holistic care within the
hospice community. The spiritual care workers possess effective understanding of the
relationship between faith, illness, as well as the emotional and mental conflicts that might arise
(Naslund et al., 2016). Thus it can be clearly understood that the impact of spiritual care workers
is highly advantageous in the healthcare hoes of Australia (Olfson, Druss & Marcus, 2015).
However, in them mentioned nation, till now very limited number of development for this
profession has been evidenced (Jim et al., 2015). Till now, the health care service users, their
families and hospitals are hesitant to use spiritual care services. Perceptual gap and lack of
effective knowledge can be considered as two of the chief reasons behind this (Sherman et al.,
2015). Both the employees as well as healthcare service users lacks surety about the effect of the
spiritual services.

2SOCIOLOGY
Limited and highly restricted of initiatives from both federal as well as local government
like awareness campaign can be considered as one of the chief reason behind lack of awareness
of both the employees of the hospitals and patients bout the services provided by spiritual
workers and volunteers (Hatamipour et al., 2015). Not only this, till now to a good amount of
healthcare service users believes that services for spiritual wellbeing is not as crucial as other
services related to the heater industry.
Another major issue associated with the provision of spiritual service is that a good
number of healthcare sieve users as well as hospital staffs mix spirituality with religion (Moradi-
Joo et al., 2017). Religion can be defined as a set of text, practices as well as beliefs associated
with the transcendent shared by a specific community and includes the practice of worshiping
deities (Rodin et al., 2015). Spirituality on the other hand can be defined as the relationship of an
individual with the transcendent question that confronts one as a human being (Memaryan et al.,
2016). Spiritual healthcare service users are not preacher of a particular religion. Instead they
provide hope and a feeling of enlightment to the healthcare services users by enhancing their
knowledge about different aspects of life (Amirmohamad et al., 2017).
Recommendations
In order deal with these drawbacks, effective recommendation has been provided bellow:
1. One of the foremost issues is that a good number of individuals mix spirituality with
religion (Epstein-Peterson et al., 2015). In order to eliminate the issue, both online as well
as offline campaigns should be conducted here the concept of spirituality and its
difference with that of religion will be discussed. Social media platforms can be used for
enhancing the awareness of the population. Spiritual workers should post videos or status

3SOCIOLOGY
where the difference between the two concepts is clearly discussed (Sajadi et al., 2018).
Considering the fact that a huge amount of population of the nation are present in social
media platform, it will be easier for the social workers to grab attention and enhance
awareness of a huge mass of people within a highly limited amount of time (Mohebbifar
et al., 2015). In order to enhance the knowledge of the hospital employees, active
collaboration between the healthcare service users and the spiritual volunteers need to be
created (Sun et al., 2016; Ripamonti et al., 2018). Collaboration will not only enhance
the awareness of the hospital staffs about the mentioned services. Not only this, seminars
and workshops should be conducted by the administrators in order to enhance the
awareness of the hospital employees (Kestenbaum et al., 2017).
2. In order to get more staffs to recommend spiritual care services to patients and their
families, along with awareness programs, both local and federal government should
involve (Delgado-Guay et al., 2016). Contracts should be developed with the healthcare
organizations so that the management involves their staffs to promote spiritual services.

4SOCIOLOGY
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